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Agreed. I use 64-bit Chrome in Ubuntu 10.10 and it's unusable. I'm not sure if it's better in 32-bit, but there's frankly no way I'm going to compromise on my b
by grantheaslip 16y ago
Agreed. I use 64-bit Chrome in Ubuntu 10.10 and it's unusable. I'm not sure if it's better in 32-bit, but there's frankly no way I'm going to compromise on my browser choice purely because of Adobe's incompetence. It usually freezes or drops down to maybe 5 FPS when I make a video full screen, it constantly uses a ridiculous amount of CPU time, it crashes tabs, and the font rendering is as shitty as ever.
I love when videos are on Vimeo because all of their videos play natively, and when I click on a YouTube video, I'm always hoping that it isn't one of the Flash-only videos that I need to switch to Firefox to watch. HTML5 might be in its infancy, but it already sucks a lot less than Flash, at least for those of us that aren't using Windows.
The issue isn't just performance—it's who I want controlling web technologies. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are open standards that anyone can implement. Whether or not the performance is the same right now, I have way more faith in Mozilla, Apple, Google and Opera than I have in Adobe (and if they all drop the ball, someone else will pick it up). Adobe definitely has talented engineers, but they've demonstrated again and again that they're just not capable of making Flash stable and efficient. I'm not sure if this is the legacy cruft built up in Flash, a lack of interest in performance on platforms besides Windows, or just pure incompetence, but I don't care. They've had over 5 years (over 10 if you count Macromedia) to work their shit out, and they haven't.
Flash may have had a role back when web technologies just weren't up the task for displaying any kind of rich content, but that day has passed. It's telling that the vast majority of articles I've read defending Flash are written by people who directly profit from Flash continuing to be a relevant technology. Some are Flash evangelists, others are just people who decided to hitch their careers to Flash and are just now coming to terms with what a bad decision that was, and a few just plain don't understand what they're talking about (e.g. Dave Winer). This author isn't one of them—he's actually provided a reasoned argument, and the awesome CSS3 stuff he's been putting out shows that he's not just blindly defending the only tool he knows—but people like him seem to be few and far between.
- pan69 16y agoI don't want this to be a "works for me" response, but I'm currently running Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS) on 64-bit and for me the Flash Player performs excellent. I can watch hours of YouTube videos, switching to full-screen and back, without a hitch. My primary browser is Chrome (installed from the Ubuntu repos, not Google's nightly builds) but Flash Player also runs just fine in FireFox. It might be worth checking for the latest version of Flash Player.
- grantheaslip 16y agoI'm using the latest 10.2 beta release. It's actually a marginal improvement over the official 10.1 package in the Ubuntu repositories. I'm using a Lenovo X201 with a common Intel graphics chip (I think it's referred to as "Intel HD Graphics"). The chip isn't the speediest out there (games are out of the question), but it's more than fast enough for HD video. I don't need any unsupported closed-source drivers, and my system is basically all Intel hardware, which as far as I'm aware are the most Linux-friendly components out there. I'm using a more-or-less stock Ubuntu install. One thing worth pointing out is that performance seems to be worse in 10.10 compared to 10.04, but I'm hesitant to blame Canonical, as Flash seems to be basically the only thing suffering. The thing is, I'm probably in the top 1% of computer users in terms of competence. If I can't figure out how to make Flash work on my laptop, how the hell is my Mom going to? If it won't just work on one of the most ideal Linux environments, something is fundamentally wrong.